This Application is a Con of Ser. No. 09/814,621 Mar. 22, 2001 now U.S. Pat. No. 6,766,093 which claims under 35 U.S.C. § 119(e), the benefit of priority of the filing date of Mar. 28, 2000, of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/192,989, filed on the aforementioned date, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to cable management devices for patch panel or network equipment racks, and more particularly to a cable manager for use with adjacent patch panels or network equipment on distribution racks or within cabinets, with an improved finger and cover design
2. Description of Related Art
Cabling, such as unshielded twisted pair, screened twisted pair, coax and fiber optic cabling, is being increasingly used in the telecommunications industry to provide data, voice, video or audio information. Patch panel or network equipment enclosure and rack systems are well-known in the industry and provided to manage and organize such cables to or from equipment or cross-connect systems. These systems usually include a standard EIA 19″, 23″ or other distribution frame rack on which one or more patch panels, network equipment, fiber optic enclosures and the like are mounted. Enclosures within the rack serve various functions, including operation as slack trays, splice trays, cable organizers and patch panels. These racks also serve as inter-connect or cross-connect enclosures when interfacing with equipment, or may serve as a telecommunications closet, allowing the cables to be terminated, spliced, patched or stored at places along their length.
The rack usually is formed of a frame having mounting apertures located along vertical legs or walls of the rack. Patching equipment, such as a patch panel, is mounted on the rack so as to define generally a patching side where patch cords coming from an active device or another patch panel can be cross-connected and interconnected, and a distribution side where cables from network equipment or a work station area are terminated. Generally some form of cable management is also provided on both sides of the rack to support and route the cables. While preventing detrimental bending is always important even for copper cabling, with the increasing use of fiber optic connectors as applied to connector rack systems, proper cable management and bend radius control has become increasingly important. Many known systems are unable to provide complete bend radius control, are inefficient in use, difficult to manufacture, or have other drawbacks and thus, improvement in the cable management of network rack systems is desired.